With global collaboration and a flat world in mind, this group of Adobe Education Leaders (primary through post secondary education) is sharing their expertise and thoughts on the use of technology in the school classroom and at districts and college/university campuses around the world.

Archive for October, 2009

Headsets, Chat, VoIP, Internal Microphones, Webcam Microphones, and External Phone Calls are the most popular ways in which people use to communicate inside Adobe Acrobat Connect Pro. For individuals with a hosted Connect Pro account or for the fortunate ones who have their own Connect Pro Server Cluster, telephone integration with Connect Pro is the way to go. Go ahead and put the headsets away and contact a company like MeetingOne: http://www.meetingone.com/us/ and get your Adobe Connect Pro Meeting Room configured to call your educator’s cell phone or office phone automatically. Yes, the Connect Pro Meeting Room will call you and get you right into the meeting room with up to 50 other individuals. Just contact MeetingOne and set-up the “Conference Room Number” and “Host Access Code,” then login into your Adobe Connect Pro account and go to “My Profile” and then “Edit My Preferences” save the information, open up your room, and turn on the internal telephone bridge and start talking and sharing in real time. It even gets better, the telephone integration works with the recording feature inside Adobe Acrobat Connect Professional. Anyone can now turn on the recording while talking on the phone and retrieve the audio and presentation from the Meeting Room. In addition, I watched the keynote from Adobe MAX 2009 and saw in amazement how cell phones will be able to host a Connect Pro Meeting. So basically, you can be inside your car, looking at the ocean, open up a Connect Pro Meeting Room on your cell phone and have the meeting room call the cell phone sitting in your hand, what is Adobe going to think of next?My Connect CardJackie Specht’s Connect Card – Meeting One

Something we’ve struggled with for some time at the University of Denver Center for Teaching and Learning (CTL) is the full integration of YouTube videos within our rich media tools such as those found within the CourseMedia™ ecosystem. Traditionally, this has been not altogether possible as previous versions of the YouTube Chromeless Player were ActionScript 2 based and so were isolated in a separate Flash Player virtual machine (VM) in any of our ActionScript 3 based tools. There are ways of setting up a proxy and transferring messages between the two VMs through that proxy- but it is messy, includes too much overhead, and is nowhere near ideal. We ended up just opening YouTube content within a browser window- not at all integrated into our systems.
A few days ago, however, Google released an AS3 based Chromeless Player. Using the new player API, we were able to not only effectively integrate seamless YouTube videos within our normal display mechanisms, but were provided the flexibility of hooking full YouTube control functionality into our existing controls for native system content. The result being that the user experiences a YouTube video in the exact same way that they would expect to experience a native system video. This greatly improves the user experience and effectively adds the entire public YouTube video library as potential course material.A quick overview video of how we’ve used this to enhance a few CourseMedia™ tools is presented below:

During the opening day of Adobe MAX 2009 in Los Angeles, two separate sessions featured DU video systems.
Firstly, Joseph Labrecque, Senior Multimedia Application Developer for the University of Denver and Adobe Higher Education Leader included mention of the ALORA Embed Generator video player and its ability to tap into Google Analytics during his session for the FITC Unconference:

Custom Event Reporting from Flash to Google Analytics
With the ability to define and report custom events from within your Flash application, you retain control over how specific events are reported and the information contained in these reports. This presentation will cover the implementation of the Google Analytics Tracking For Adobe Flash ActionScript 3 API for generating custom events and the generation of unorthodox event logging from within Flash.

This presentation was streamed live by FITC and Influxis.
Another strong mention was made by John Schuman, Education Solutions Architect for Adobe Systems during his session on video delivery systems in education during which he focused on the CourseMedia™ application:

Customizing the University Experience with a Rich Media Delivery System
Explore the potential of developing a customized, security-focused, RSS-driven delivery solution. This session shows how you can use Adobe Flash Media Rights Management Server, Flash Media Server 3, and Adobe Media Player

While there were some inaccuracies presented during the session, the spirit of our system was well-represented and we thank John for his coverage of CourseMedia™ and other DU video delivery mechanisms.

Ancient civilizations used Adobe to build houses which led to the building of communities. The low cost of using mud and straw to build infrastructure was accessible to the masses. Today, modern educators are using Adobe to build educational communities and web infrastructure for the future. The mud and straw has been replaced with air, clouds, and Adobe Acrobat Connect Pro. The low cost of a Hosted Adobe Acrobat Connect Pro account will make a tremendous impact and improvement on any school district. The technology delivered from Adobe Acrobat Connect Pro can bring in new tools and services to a school organization. One low cost Hosted Acrobat Connect Pro account resource can be spread across a school district to: build a help desk system, allow for online meetings with telephone integration and recording capabilities, long-distance interviewing for new positions for the district office or school buildings, online professional development, online training, live recordings of teacher lectures posted to the web for students who are sick or need extra help, digital newsletter, web presentations, software trainings and simulations, collaboration and sharing of expertise beyond school district boundaries. I would encourage every educator to use Adobe to build a new place for learning, growing, and help students strive for excellence. Adobe Acrobat Connect Pro is the modern building block, so roll up your sleeves, reach for the sky, and start building a new educational community for the future.Adobe Connect Pro Resource MapOnline AP Calculus Lectures – Adobe Acrobat Connect Pro/Smart Board IntegrationMy Connect CardJackie Specht’s Connect Card